Dr. Ahmed G. Abo-Khalil

Electrical Engineering Department

High-temperature s

Until 1986, physicists had believed that BCS theory forbade superconductivity at temperatures above about 30 K. In that year, Bednorz and Müller discovered superconductivity in a lanthanum-based cuprate perovskite material, which had a transition temperature of 35 K (Nobel Prize in Physics, 1987).[2] It was soon found that replacing the lanthanum with yttrium (i.e., making YBCO) raised the critical temperature to 92 K, which was important because liquid nitrogen could then be used as a refrigerant (the boiling point of nitrogen is 77 K at atmospheric pressure). This is important commercially because liquid nitrogen can be produced
cheaply on-site from air, and is not prone to some of the problems (for
instance solid air plugs) of helium in piping. Many other cuprate superconductors have since been
discovered, and the theory of superconductivity in these materials is
one of the major outstanding challenges of theoretical condensed matter physics.

From about 1993, the highest temperature superconductor was a ceramic
material consisting of thallium, mercury, copper, barium, calcium and
oxygen (HgBa2Ca2Cu3O8+δ) with Tc = 138 K.

In February 2008, an iron-based family of high-temperature superconductors was discovered. Hideo Hosono, of the Tokyo Institute of Technology, and colleagues found lanthanum oxygen fluorine iron arsenide (LaO1-xFxFeAs), an oxypnictide that superconducts below 26 K. Replacing the lanthanum in LaO1−xFxFeAs with samarium leads to superconductors that work at 55 K.[34]

Crystal structure of high-temperature ceramic superconductors

The structure of a high-Tc superconductor is closely related to perovskite structure, and the structure of these compounds has been described as a
distorted, oxygen deficient multi-layered perovskite structure. One of
the properties of the crystal structure of oxide superconductors is an
alternating multi-layer of CuO2 planes with superconductivity taking place between these layers. The more layers of CuO2 the higher Tc.
This structure causes a large anisotropy in normal conducting and
superconducting properties, since electrical currents are carried by
holes induced in the oxygen sites of the CuO2 sheets. The electrical conduction is highly anisotropic, with a much higher conductivity parallel to the CuO2 plane than in the perpendicular direction. Generally, Critical
temperatures depend on the chemical compositions, cations substitutions
and oxygen content. They can be classified as superstripes;
i.e., particular realizations of superlattices at atomic limit made of
superconducting atomic layers, wires, dots separated by spacer layers,
that gives multiband and multigap superconductivity.